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Chris Christie’s New Jersey Is Everything That’s Wrong With America

Think of New Jersey and what comes to mind is the distilled essence of every tragic choice made in this country since the mid-20th century: namely, the fiasco of suburban sprawl and the miserable sclerosis of its diminishing returns—a whole state composed of places no longer worth caring about.

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Gov. Chris Christie’s problems with the phony “traffic study” on the George Washington Bridge, apparently intended to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for failure to offer an election endorsement, ought to be seen as a symptom of a much greater societal illness: the over-investment in a living arrangement with no future.

That is the essence of the suburban matrix. It has no future because it was designed to run on cheap oil. Despite the hype broadcast during these past few years of extraordinary wishful thinking, America is not destined to become “energy independent,” “the next Saudi Arabia” or “the world’s leading oil exporter.” This is all pernicious bullshit. The raptures of shale oil arise out of the inhalations of Ponzi smoke and mirrors. America will soon learn the painful truth: Shale oil is a bubble among many financial bubbles. It will not fulfill America’s master wish: to be able to keep driving to WalMart forever.

The essence of the shale oil Ponzi is that the high price of unconventional oil impairs the formation of the very capital needed for re-investment in the expensive procedures of drilling and fracking for shale oil, a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The kind of economic “growth” we used to consider normal requires cheap oil, and that’s exactly what shale oil is not. Bottom line: The required capital investment will not be available to keep up the heroic rates of drilling needed for a rapidly depleting resource. Some refer to this as the Red Queen Syndrome (From Alice in Wonderland: “I’m running as fast as I can to stay where I am”). I expect the shale oil “miracle” to crap out in five years or less, and with it America’s dream of perpetual Happy Motoring.

At the heart of America’s suburban sprawl predicament is that it has provoked a corrosive psychology of previous investment. Having poured all the treasure of the 20th century into the matrix of housing subdivisions, malls and strip malls, office parks, freeways, highways and numberless paved byways, we can’t imagine reforming it, letting go of it or getting over it. It’s our stuff and we appear to be stuck with it. The future, however, is going to compel us to live differently whether we like it or not, and we are doing absolutely nothing to prepare for that.

To me, the danger of a President Christie is that he is about the last politician one might expect to recognize the nation’s tragic predicament and he is exactly the figure who will mount America’s deadly final campaign to sustain the unsustainable. He represents what amounts to a sort of national debt slavery: We will pay any price to stay where history has marooned us. One vivid example of this was Governor Christie’s decision in 2010 to cancel New Jersey’s participation in building a new commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to relieve the unsustainable pressure on the existing 100-year-old train tunnels. He derided the project as “a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s.” Christie then diverted $4 billion from the tunnel project to New Jersey’s transportation trust fund in a bid to keep the state’s gas tax the second-lowest in the country. (New Jersey’s transit system, meanwhile, ranks among the country’s worst, and Christie has cut its funding.)

This little maneuver highlights one of the nation’s most lamentable political failures of recent decades: the lack of will to invest in public transportation, in particular, upgrading and rehabilitating our conventional passenger railroad system. Governor Christie represents the majority of Americans who have no idea how close we are to the twilight of mass automobile motoring. Hence, the vacuum of political leadership—in the sense of being able to galvanize the attention of the clueless voting public in order to take society where it doesn’t know it needs to go.

This is a big, continent-sized country. We currently get around it mainly in cars and airplanes. I doubt most people realize that commercial aviation as we know it has a horizon as close and low as Happy Motoring. The business model for airlines has been failing consistently for a decade, especially as the cost of aviation fuel shot up. All the airlines have been through their major rounds of merger and bankruptcy. They’ve sloughed off as much of their pension obligations as they can, fired every last non-essential employee and downgraded the pay and quality of their workers from the pilots down to the guys who load the snack boxes. They have also eliminated routes and destinations and cut trips-per-day to the “third-tier” small cities. While this occurred, and fares got more expensive, their customer base of the broad middle class has been monkey-hammered into indigence. I flatly predict that in another decade the airline industry as we’ve known it will cease to exist.

If we don’t rebuild the conventional passenger rail network in America, we will not be going anywhere. By the way, forget about high-speed rail. We missed the window of opportunity for that pre-2008 when capital was still available. Instead, we spent all that capital on building the last great gasp of suburban sprawl (i.e. the housing bubble, more stuff with no future) and on military adventures halfway around the globe. But, we have a conventional rail system that was once the envy of the world rusting away out in the rain, waiting to be fixed. It is imperative that we get that project underway, and politicians like Chris Christie stand in the way of that. Beyond the obvious benefits of rehabilitating the railroads for all classes of society, it would create scores of thousands of jobs at all levels. Accomplishing it would also boost a demoralized and discouraged public confidence to get on with other imperative readjustments in our national living arrangement.

These adjustments all hinge on the re-localization and downscaling of the major activities that add up to civilized life: we have to grow more of our food closer to home (as oil-based agri-business flounders); we have to move out of failing suburbia into more compact neighborhoods and towns; we have to prepare for the difficult, necessary contraction of our overgrown giant urban metroplexes (New York City in particular); we have to re-organize commerce away from the monocultures of car-dependent big box corporate despotism and rebuild resilient Main Street infrastructures of trade, and we have to do all these things with a kind of conscious and deliberate earnestness that amounts to a national sense of purpose—something sorely absent in these baleful days of Kardashians, universal obesity and comprehensive American anomie. In short, we have to become a lot less like New Jersey.

The trouble last fall in Fort Lee was not just a political farce. It should be a sign to us of the fragility, the lack of resilience, in the operations of daily life in our country. I see no indication that Christie, for all his alleged charms, understands this.

James Howard Kunstler is author of The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic and the World Made By Hand novels.